During the early years of the Cold War, the United States and China had almost no diplomatic contact and certainly no trade agreements. China was firmly sided with the Soviet Union against the United States; however, in 1972 President Richard Nixon made a formal visit to China in an attempt to reopen trade between the two nations and normalize relations. The visit is considered the greatest foreign policy success of the Nixon administration.

The answer which occurred the most recently is the Vietnam War. The Civil War was fought from 1861 until 1865; the Spanish-American War was fought in 1898; World War Two was fought from 1939 until 1945; The Korean War was fought from 1950 until 1953; the Vietnam War was fought from 1965 until 1976. The Vietnam War began during the Presidency of Lyndon B. Johnson and did not end until after Nixon had been forced out of office by the Watergate scandal.

The Domino Theory was an important part of American foreign policy throughout much of the Cold War. It states that, if one country falls under the influence of communism, the neighboring countries are likely to follow suit. The theory was first suggested by President Eisenhower to try and encourage support for the French forces in Vietnam.

The Cuban Missile Crisis occurred in 1962, when the Soviet Union installed nuclear weapons in Cuba, less than ninety miles from United States’ soil. The American President at the time was John F. Kennedy, and the leader of the Soviet Union was Nikita Khrushchev. The result of the incident was that the Soviet Union ended up withdrawing it’s nuclear weapons from Cuba under the agreement that the United States would remove its from Turkey. For the short period of time that the Cuban Missile Crisis raged, it is generally considered to be the closest that the two superpowers got to nuclear annihilation during the long Cold War.

Sputnik was a Soviet satellite. It was the first artificial satellite to orbit the earth. This took place in 1957 and began the Space Race between the Soviet Union and the United States. Sputnik was important, geopolitically speaking, for promoting panic in the United States that America was getting left behind by the more scientifically and technologically advanced Soviets. It can be seen as the reason why America landed on the moon only twelve years later.

Although the Bay of Pigs Invasion was planned during the Presidency of Dwight Eisenhower, it was not actually carried out until 1961, during the Presidency of John F. Kennedy. It was a failed American invasion of Cuba and is important in the larger context of the Cold War for solidifying the complete deterioration of American relations with Cuba and for precipitating the Cuban Missile Crisis only a year later.

The Bay of Pigs invasion took place in 1961. The CIA trained exiled Cuban troops that then touched down on Cuban soil with the intention of overthrowing the Cuban government and assassinating Fidel Castro. It did not succeed.

Yuri Gagarin was the first human in outer space. He was a citizen of the Soviet Union and was the first man to orbit the earth in 1961. His achievement was part of the early years of the Space Race when the Soviet Union was the first nation to put a satellite into orbit and the first to put a man into space.

The Warsaw Pact is the name given to the treaty and alliance formed between the various communist states of Europe and the Soviet Union in response to the signing of NATO between the capitalist states of Western Europe and America.

The fall of the Soviet Union, and therefore the end of the Cold War, occurred in 1991. This represents the end of the great competition between capitalism and communism that had raged for forty-five years since the end of World War Two. Although it is worth noting that there are still communist nations in the world—China and North Korea are two prominent examples.